Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Slippery Slope

Cyber warfare knows no borders, respects no treaties, and takes no prisoners.
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The
first attacks were secret. The world rarely knew that anything was happening — even though warfare was raging around them — because it was in
the best interest of everyone to keep it a secret. Companies attacked
companies. Nations attacked nations. Hackers attacked everyone. But they all
worked hard to remain hidden. The attacks had goals: blackmail, top secret
plans, money, or sabotaging the work of the enemy. Rarely did the attacks
become public knowledge. Stuxnet in 2010, was an outlier. They — the US and
Israeli governments — didn’t want anyone to know what they were doing. In 2014, the North
Koreans attacked Sony over the release of a film mocking their leader. In 2017,
India sabotaged China’s currency market. In 2020, Russia uploaded malware to the
major solar panel manufacturers in an attempt to cripple the main competition
for its oil exports. In 2024, a shadowy group of hackers stole the code for
self-driving cars and threatened to cause all the cars to crash if they didn’t
receive payment. Those, however, are only the few battles we know about. Many,
many more remained hidden.

The war raged, as wars do, and for most
people life went on as normal. The battlefield was high-level servers,
corporate secrets, and government security systems. Most of the world didn’t notice or care, but
for those in the fight it became more and more clear that the war would have to
end — one way or another. The alliance formed along predictable lines. The
United States and Western Europe stood together. They were joined by Brazil and
Japan against the loose coalition of Russia, India, China, Iran, and North
Korea. Past hurts led to future attacks. War is war, after all.

For the average person the conflict barely
registered. Sometimes people complained about slow internet speeds. Sometimes
the self-driving cars failed to pick people up at the appointed time. Sometimes
a package delivery drone would leave the item at the wrong address. Minor
inconveniences that were easily shrugged off. Now we know — through the hindsight
of history — that great battles were raging. The slowing of the internet
happened because vast botnets with billions of computers were throwing data at
each other and taking nearly all of the bandwidth available. Drones and cars
were misled because the GPS system was spoofed and the automated vehicles didn’t know where they
actually were.

What we know now is that the allies won. What we
know now is that they took steps to ensure such a conflict would never happen
again. What we know now is that they were foolish, misguided, and ignorant of
history. What we know now is that we are paying for the mistakes of the victors
with our lives.